A Little Ephemeris Lesson

Bet you didn’t expect another newsletter from me so soon after I warned just a week ago that I didn’t feel any pressure to inundate you with newsletters. But, wow, the response to that last one was almost overwhelming, I’d say the biggest response any newsletter of ours has ever generated, in 26 years of putting out newsletters. Goes to show how thirsty for no-nonsense Human Design people are out there.

Thank you to everybody who responded. I tried to answer all your writings individually, but if I didn’t, it’s not because I don’t appreciate them, but because of the sheer volume and also because some of your responses showed me how much confusion is out there and deserve to be answered publicly, for the education of all. So, you can expect to hear more from me, whenever the words come together in the right way.

One of the additional big surprises was the number of orders the 2019 Pocket Ephemeris received. Thank you very much! That section at the end was added just as a little filler, with the hope that the one or the other would be sold and I wouldn’t have so many left over toward the end of the year, as has been the case in the past. I got so many orders for it that we actually ran out and I had to order another little batch, at a premium price from the printer. So now we should have enough of them to also accommodate the stragglers ordering throughout the rest of the year. I usually put them on sale after the middle of the year, if you want to wait that long to save a little.

I can imagine that some of these new ephemeris clients will receive the little booklet, look at it and wonder, well, now what? And that’s the purpose of this particular newsletter, to give you a quick few hints about what to do with an ephemeris and how it can help you. After all, after this year’s edition’s success, I’m likely to order a larger run for the 2020 edition from the printer and I want you to buy it again, so that I don’t remain sitting on a bunch of unsold copies because you just shrug your shoulders. You are more likely to buy it again if you know how to use it and recognize its benefits. So here goes:

Remember that the planets imprint you at the moment of your birth, as is shown in your birth chart, but continue to be a conditioning factor for the whole of your life. Because they move, that conditioning changes continuously. People usually see these changes as the ups and downs of life and just drift along and cope as best they can. With your birth chart, an ephemeris and a basic knowledge of the mechanics you can actually see what’s happening and this might make your cruise a lot smoother than it might be otherwise. It can even help you plan for the future to a certain degree.

The Pocket Ephemeris shows you the planetary positions throughout the year. (Note that for simplicity’s sake we call all of these conditioning entities “planets,” even if the Sun, the Nodes or the Moon are not actually planets.) At the top of the page you can see the planetary glyphs and below them the columns with their day-by-day positions indexed into the hexagrams and lines of the I Ching. The hexagrams are called “gates” when placed in centers and that’s what I’ll call them from now on.

The positions are checked every day at noon GMT and all the times noted in the ephemeris are GMT as well. If you don’t live in a time zone congruent with GMT you have to adjust to your time zone. There’s a map at the end of the booklet to help you do that. So, for example, if you live in the Eastern time zone of the US, you’re five hours behind GMT and the positions of the planets are for 7 am (07:00), not noon. If you live in Germany, you are an hour ahead of GMT and the position are for 1 pm (13:00), not noon. If you live in Japan, you are 9 hours ahead of GMT and your positions are at 9 pm (21:00). And so on. If your region switches to summer time or so-called daylight saving time for a part of the year, you need to adjust for that as well, i.e. Eastern US time zone will be only 4 hours behind GMT between March and November.

To make the picture not too crowded, only the changes are shown in the columns. That’s why there’s often all that blank space between the numbers, especially for the slow moving outer planets, from Mars and beyond. Since the positons are checked only every 24 hours, when you see a new line showing up in a column, it actually means that the line changed in the previous 24 hours, not exactly at noon GMT. For most practical purposes, this is sufficiently accurate.

Sun and Earth cover approximately a line per day and therefore it takes them usually six days to cross a gate and you get to see a line change per day. The inner planets Mercury and Venus sometimes move very quickly through a gate and so you don’t always get to see all their line changes in the columns.

An additional factor shown is the planets moving direct or retrograde, denoted with a capital D or R. Sun, Earth and Moon always move direct, but all the other planets have occasional retrograde phases, shown as D or R when the directional change occurred in the past 24 hours. The Nodes always move retrograde, with occasional direct spurts. Of course, the planets don’t really change their direction. It just looks that way from our viewpoint on Earth within the mechanics of the solar system.

There are a few visual aids in the Pocket Ephemeris. At the beginning of each month the last position of a planet and its direction is repeated in gray, so that you don’t have to flip the page back to see where it was. If the numbers or letters are black at the beginning of the month, it means that the change happened in the past 24 hours, as usual.

Another visual aid are the small black triangles. They denote that the planet changed from one gate to the next in the past 24 hours.

The moon is a different story. It moves very quickly through the gates, two or three of them per day. So the Pocket Ephemeris shows the exact times at which the Moon changes gates. Those are GMT as well and you’ll adjust according to your time zone.

So, what does all that mean in practical terms? The better you know the basic mechanics of your chart, the more practical value you can get out of using the ephemeris. If you still think you’re for example a “1/3 Emotional Generator,” the Jovian take, an ephemeris won’t help you all that much. But if you see your chart instead as a “Split definition to Wait” with the sacral center involved in one of your definitions, for example, then you can get optimal value out of it. If the basic mechanics are a mystery to you, you should take the first of Zeno’s sequence of classes “What’s On the Chart.” That should set you on the right track for a start. It’s available for $49 here (step 1).

Let me show you how I use the ephemeris with the example of my chart, which shows a “Single definition, to Wait.” Forget all the numbers and focus on the picture. You can see that I have only one definition, connecting the Spleen to the Heart. The rest is pretty wide open to conditioning. Conditioning is completely misunderstood in Jovianism and I will definitely need to come back to the theme in one or more of my future newsletters, but for now just take it as it is.

The Heart center is a "motor," but it doesn’t connect to the Throat in my case and therefore I have a Design to Wait and not a Design to Do. I can check the ephemeris and see that from January 15 to 22 the planet Mars is transiting gate 21, thereby providing a bridge between my defined Heart center and my activated gate 45 in the Throat. This means that I’m conditioned by Mars to have a Design to Do during that time. For now, I can’t go into the details what that means for me practically, but you certainly can see that there must be a difference whether I’m living with a Design to Wait or a Design to Do.

Likewise, before Mars moves into gate 21, it moves through gate 17 in the Ajna center for a few days. I usually have an undefined mental system, but during that time Mars connects to my activations of gate 62 in the Throat and gives me a mental definition for that time. Can you see that this is valuable information for me? Rather than getting tossed around by these changes unknowingly, I can see beforehand and be prepared and know what’s happening and make good use of it. That’s what an ephemeris is good for. If you know the chart of someone close to you, you can apply the same knowledge and that may be very helpful to weather the ups and downs of a relationship.

In the early days of my Human Design practice I used to check the Pocket Ephemeris for the entire year ahead and highlighted with a yellow marker all those transits that would connect with one of the activations in my chart, thereby adding a definition, with a blue marker those transits that would sit on one of my activations, thereby altering their flavor, or with a green marker when the transits would add definitions not necessarily connecting with my design, such as the oppositions 34-20, 43-23 and 37-40 formed regularly by Sun and Earth or the Nodes. Looking at an example of this below, you can see that there’s lots of relevant planetary conditioning going on for me in January 2019. Meanwhile I know my chart so well that I don’t need to use markers any longer, but if you’re early in your journey, this might be a good idea.

Of course I can make a transit chart with my computer program and see my conditioned design at a specific point in time. You can look at my transit chart of January 15 and it’s obvious that this looks very different from my birth chart. While this is certainly helpful, I actually prefer to look at the ephemeris because it shows me at a glance not only a specific point in time, but all the context as well, what leads up to a certain point and what follows it as well. Since I’m very familiar with my chart, I can easily fill in the transits and see the resulting picture in my mind.

There’s a little free space on the right side of the Moon where I make short notes of where I’ve been, when I’ve been sick, when I’ve sat in an airplane, crossed a border, experienced an earthquake, done a reading and things like that. That’s sometimes interesting to see looking back in connection with the transits. The four thin columns to the very right are for some personal codes for usually regular occurrences. You’ll find your own uses.

So, I hope this will help all the first-timers with the Pocket Ephemeris make good use of this nifty tool. As I said, it requires a little practice and diligence and you do have to know the basic mechanics, but the rewards are certainly there. If you'd like a little more detail, there's a short class by Zeno, How to Use the Pocket Ephemeris, available right underneath the 2019 Pocket Ephemeris section.

$13.50, including worldwide shipping

Expanding Horizon

You can tell from the above that I love ephemerides. And so over the years I’ve also been making ephemerides covering longer spans of time, the Zen Human Design Ephemeris, with each volume covering 25 years. I’m very interested in history and it’s big fun to check historical events or periods with the help of these books. Seeing the far outer planets with their generational conditioning move between gates 29 and 14 during the 1960s, for example, gives me a whole other dimension in understanding that period.

With the addition of a new volume 1926-1950, the Zen Human Design Ephemeris now also covers World War 2 and the times leading up to it, as well as the start of the baby boom. All in all, the Zen Human Design Ephemeris now extends 125 years. In spring I’ll add another volume, 2051-2075.

The difference between the annual Pocket Ephemeris is of course the massively extended timespan it covers and it’s also a little more detailed with positions checked every 12 hours instead of 24. But it’s also more unwieldy and doesn’t fit into a purse or pocket. Plus, if you’re interested in the Moon, a 12-hour check is much coarser than what is offered in the Pocket Ephemeris. The two projects have different purposes and complement each other perfectly.

New:Zen Human Design Ephemeris 1926-1950soft cover, 154 pages

$42, plus shipping

Check out more details and the other volumes here.
If you buy more than one volume at the same time you get a discount of 25%.